An international team of scientists, including a senior researcher at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has uncovered new evidence of ancient wildfires that reshapes our understanding of Earth’s turbulent Early Triassic epoch, about 250 million years ago.
An international team of scientists, including a senior researcher at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has uncovered new evidence of ancient wildfires that reshapes our understanding of Earth’s turbulent Early Triassic epoch, about 250 million years ago.
The findings, reported in Communications Earth & Environment, published under the title «Wildfire, ecosystem and climate interactions in the Early Triassic», challenge the long-standing belief in a global «charcoal gap», a time interval with little or no evidence of fire following the world’s greatest mass extinction.
For decades, the absence of charcoal in the geologic record led scientists to assume that wildfires had all but disappeared after the Permian–Triassic extinction, also known as the «Great Dying.» This was the most severe mass extinction in Earth’s history, resulting in the loss of up to 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species, primarily caused by massive volcanic eruptions.
This latest study sheds new light on this period, revealing microscopic chemical traces of charred vegetation preserved in sediments.
The team tested 30 sediment samples retrieved from Svalbard, the Norwegian Arctic archipelago better known today as home to the Global Seed Vault.
